Search

Editors' Choice Awards

The Linux landscape has been altered
considerably since last year's Editors' Choice Awards, which were
given at what was somewhere near the peak of the technology/dot-com
boom from which the economy is still attempting to recover. Last
year we remarked at the difficulty of choosing winners among such a
numerous field of competitors, and you'd think that a reduction in
competitors necessarily would make the decisions easier. But it
ain't necessarily so. Though there's been a decrease of vendors in
some categories (most notably hardware), there are still numerous
quality offerings (free and otherwise) that, along with the Linux
kernel, have improved in quality during the last year.

The Linux Journal Editors' Choice Awards
are open to both open-source and proprietary software, and among
this year's picks in the software categories you'll find
representations of both. While all of us may now be smug in being
able to choose among so many open-source products for our software
needs, let's not forget to do our best to ensure this choice
continues by guarding against the dangers of SSSCA-like legislation
that would require mandatory Digital Rights Management, making a
free or even source-available operating system illegal. Write
directly to Senator Hollings and Senator Stevens and to your
representatives if you are a US citizen (you can look your
representative up on congress.org), support or join the Electronic
Frontier Foundation and educate friends and associates.

Contrary to last year we won't encourage the use of alcohol
in reconciling you to any of our choices that may not be in accord
with your own. But if you find yourself piqued in the extreme with
any of our selections, may I refer you to our Readers' Choice
Awards?

Do you want to set up an 802.11b network with
high-performance antennas for inexpensive WAN connections? Do you
want an 802.11b base station with VPN functionality to keep users'
laptops secure? Do you want to deploy centrally managed mail, Samba
and VPN boxes to all your company's home office users? Filanet
makes a series of inexpensive, fanless embedded Linux network
devices, based around a custom ASIC with an ARM CPU core and
hardware 3DES, that will solve a lot of problems for companies and
ISPs at only a little more than the price of a dumb DSL box.

You know your program has caught on when people start to use
its name as a verb. Running Nmap every time you set up a new Linux
server, and periodically to see if anything has changed on your
network, has become a standard security practice. It's no
coincidence that the spread of Nmap has coincided with Linux
distributions finally paring down the menu of potentially
exploitable services offered by default. For providing an
easy-to-use “security idiot light” to Linux system administrators
and distributions everywhere, Nmap, we salute you.

We put this system's dual Athlon MP motherboard in our
Ultimate Linux Box but APPRO, working from an original design by VA
Linux Systems, put it in a thin, rugged 1U server with four
hot-swap SCSI drives plus a thin CD-ROM. Powerful blowers and a
custom power supply make this the web server we wish was on the
market when there was still such a thing as a web server
budget.

Any of this year's notebook computers are cheap enough and
fast enough to be a primary workstation for almost anyone. But when
you have a machine that you need to work and can't fix yourself,
you need really good service. The following is a true ThinkPad
service story for a 1998 model with a broken display cable: IBM
sent a padded shipping box at their expense; we returned it with
the computer inside on a Tuesday. It came back that Thursday. Our
cost: $0. Got to love that three-year warranty.

Other things we like about ThinkPads include the keyboard,
the red nipple pointing device and the thriving user community that
posts good compatibility reports to the
site. The T
series, which Phil, our publisher, carries now, has a nifty white
LED light just bright enough to illuminate the keyboard and comes
with screen resolutions up to 1400 x 1050.

Some new ThinkPads are available with 802.11b; check
www.linux-laptop.net/ibm.html
for the latest compatibility reports. Sadly, not all models can be
ordered with Linux preinstalled, and IBM, in violation of
Microsoft's license, does not offer Windows refunds.

This is the box spec'ed by our staff and built (and currently
offered for sale) by Monarch Computer. It was one of the two
Ultimate Linux Boxes described in our annual ULB article in the
November 2001 issue. It's got a great looking case and features
some excellent hardware including the Tyan Thunder K7
motherboard.

Put down that crack pipe, I mean Netscape 4.x browser, Linux
fans! Mozilla and Konqueror have both reached the point of
stability and featurefulitude that we needed to drop the crusty,
Motif-based old Netscape for good. We had to give the Editors'
Choice to Konqueror because of its excellent integration with the
KDE desktop environment, general speed and ability to easily use
that Flash plugin we need to see all those goofy animations people
keep sending us. And there was much rejoicing.

As reported in Robin Rowe's recent GFX columns, Linux
literally is taking over the motion picture industry for use in
special effects and animation. In no other industry is there such a
massive migration to Linux. Maya is a big part of this, porting
their product to Linux in response to customer demand. It's even
earned Linus' approval, and he calls it “the most complex and
powerful 3-D graphics application ever to run on Linux”.

We thought we had lost BRU to corporate shenanigans, but
thankfully longtime BRUmeister Tim Jones, formerly development VP
of BRU's original vendor EST, saved the old-school backup workhorse
and is offering it under the TOLIS Group brand name. BRU offers
easy configuration of your backup plan to match it to the tapes you
use and sponsors the
linuxtapecert.org
web site that lists tested and approved tape drives for
Linux.

We have twenty-some OpenSSH processes going on one server at
our offices at Linux Journal. One workstation
has six. We start up tunnels, scp stuff around and basically live
in ssh sessions. It's convenient, stable, and a real pleasure to
set up and administer. But the real reason for giving this award to
OpenSSH is that if not for OpenSSH, we'd all have to live in
Seattle.

KDevelop has a thriving user community, offers debugging and
class browsing tools and even makes it easy to start up a new
project in the standard GNU style. People coming from proprietary
IDEs will find that KDevelop can mimic several popular interface
styles. Embedded distribution vendor REDSonic chose KDevelop as the
integrated development environment for their RedIce Linux.

Ported to Linux in 1999, Oracle has become quite a
competitor. Last year the award went to PostgreSQL, and while it's
still a strong contender and has received a lot of publicity this
year, one can't ignore Oracle's sheer performance.

This word processor starts up in about three seconds on a
decent system and takes about 5MB of memory for a blank document.
That is not a misprint—just a good, basic word processor, nothing
fancy. Yes, it has printing now, and yes, it will import Microsoft
Word documents. Try it—you'll either like it or you won't have
wasted much time downloading it.

The new KDE desktop environment has a bit of a way to go as
far as resource consumption and stability, but each succeeding
version promises that it is on its way to a high polish. It has
improved architecture and some very active development. Among the
nicest features is the integration of the KDE browser, Konqueror,
into the desktop as a file manager. Type any word into the address
bar and get a Google search of that term. Also, KDevelop is
completely integrated as well—see Development Tool.

Linux-capable PDAs come in two flavors: capable of running
minimal software only and high-powered with speed and space to
experiment. The iPAQ is the best of the latter bunch, with a good
industrial design except for the almost-symmetrical stylus. It's
attracted quite a development community, so there are plenty of
applications and documentation for people starting out with a Linux
PDA. And with accessories such as a PCMCIA card sleeve and an
upcoming camera/accelerometer, the iPAQ looks to be a good platform
for Linux innovation into the future.

Lineo has done a good job of making a product that appeals to
a wide range of embedded developers. Embedix has a nice interface,
plentiful features and great documentation that work to lessen the
embedded Linux learning curve and allow developers to concentrate
on their applications.

This patch is only 1,000 lines and uses the existing kernel
SMP-locking strategy for respectable real-time gains at a small
price. Not just for embedded systems weenies, everyone who wants to
listen to an audio stream and untar a big archive at once will
appreciate this.

The LPI team did an extensive research project before
beginning its exams to determine what skills Linux professionals
actually use in their jobs. Then they conducted an extensive
item-writing and technical review process, performed a Modified
Angoff study on Linux experts and did a bunch of super-scientific
Hari Seldon stuff to give the test the best possible chance of
actually measuring Linux skill. Newly LPI-certified people report
that the test is hard but fair.

This multiplayer game was developed by Dynamix and ported to
Linux by the folks at Loki. As our game reviewer, Neil Doane says,
“Not since Quake III have so many developers
lost so much time, over so many networks and produced so little.
This game rockulates.”

It's a testimony to the factiticy of Internet Time that one
of the Net's most influential personalities came out with his first
autobiography at age 31. We say first because the fun has clearly
just started.

Linus Torvalds is no less accidental as an author than he is
as a revolutionary. But in a way that's the point. The book seems
less published than floated, as the title says, just for fun. It's
one side of a conversation about some stuff that might be worth
talking about. If not, well, the author doesn't care. Viewed from
an angle more native to Linus' tribe, Just for
Fun is a hack, and an early one, subject to completion
and revision over time. From similar angles it's not hard to see as
a set of man pages or bug lists.

It's an interesting irony that the operating system best
known for its founding character actually is authored by a vast
peerage of other characters. It's a subtle thing, but reading this
book is a great way to gain insights into what brought all these
characters together, and into why it's possible for anything so
ordinary as an operating system to be so darn much fun.

In today's economy a lot of people can't afford to go out
buying hot geek doo-dads on impulse like some of us had been doing
for a while. Fortunately, there are no new expensive must-have toys
this year. Time to consolidate, become more efficient and get ready
for the next boom. Velcro ties for organizing cables,
adhesive-backed Velcro for putting on equipment and pre-Velcroed
products are all part of living a more organized, neater life,
especially if you use a laptop as your main work machine and need
to bundle up all those accessories and cables. No word on whether
or not Velcro is good feng shui, but if it helps tidy up messy
cables it can't hurt. And it's fun.

Recently acquired by DeviceForge LLC, LinuxDevices is back in
the hands of its founder, Rick Lehrbaum. The site has done a
terrific job of providing a wealth of information in the form of
news, HOWTOs, product reviews and comparisons, and discussion
forums. While primarily focused on embedded Linux, it has a lot to
offer the average Linux geek as well.

In some ways the last year hasn't been a banner one for the
German company with the tropical mascot. SuSE took some collateral
damage from the dot-com implosion, destaffing offices in the US and
cutting back elsewhere in the world.

But while the dot-commies of the world played air guitar,
pretending to have real business models, SuSE continued to produce
music the old-fashioned way, and for old-fashioned customers. They
were a business, and they were in business to do business. The
result in 2001 was a series of 7.x distributions, each built around
the 2.4 Linux kernel, that have earned a torrent of praise for
their comprehensive utility, their documentation and their
performance, among many other virtues, all adding up to a real
winner. Plus, it's currently the only distribution to offer an
encrypted filesystem as an install-time option.